414 VENETIAN INDEX

11. Baptism. There is more of the true picture quality in this work than in the former one, but still very little appearance of enjoyment or care. The colour is for the most part grey and uninteresting, and the figures are thin and meagre in form, and slightly painted; so much so, that, of the nineteen figures in the distance, about a dozen are hardly worth calling figures, and the rest are so sketched and flourished in that one can hardly tell which is which. There is one point about it very interesting to a landscape painter: the river is seen far into the distance, with a piece of copse bordering it: the sky beyond is dark, but the water nevertheless receives a brilliant reflection from some unseen rent in the clouds, so brilliant, that when I was first at Venice, not being accustomed to Tintoret’s slight execution, or to see pictures so much injured, I took this piece of water for a piece of sky.¹ The effect, as Tintoret has arranged it, is indeed somewhat unnatural, but it is valuable as showing his recognition of a principle unknown to half the historical painters of the present day,-that the reflection seen in water is totally different from the object seen above it, and that it is very possible to have a bright light in reflection where there appears nothing but darkness to be reflected. The clouds in the sky itself are round, heavy, and lightless; and in a great degree spoil what would otherwise be a fine landscape distance. Behind the rocks on the right a single head is seen, with a collar on the shoulders: it seems to be intended for a portrait of some person connected with the picture.

12. Resurrection. Another of the “effect of light” pictures, and not a very striking one, the best part of it being the two distant figures of the Maries seen in the dawn of the morning. The conception of the Resurrection itself is characteristic of the worst points of Tintoret. His impetuosity is here in the wrong place; Christ bursts out of the rock like a thunderbolt, and the angels themselves seem likely to be crushed under the rent stones of the tomb. Had the figure of Christ been sublime, this conception might have been accepted; but, on the contrary, it is weak, mean, and painful; and the whole picture is languidly or roughly painted, except only the fig-tree at the top of the rock, which, by a curious caprice, is not only drawn in the painter’s best manner, but has golden ribs to all its leaves, making it look like one of the beautiful crossed or chequered patterns, of which he is so fond in his dresses: the leaves themselves being a dark olive brown.

13. The Agony in the Garden. I cannot at present understand the order of these subjects; but they may have been misplaced. This, of all the San Rocco pictures, is the most hastily painted, but it is not, like those we have been passing, clodly² painted; it seems to have been executed altogether with a hearth-broom, and in a few hours. It is another of the “effects,” and a very curious one; the angel who bears the cup to Christ is surrounded by a red halo; yet the light which falls

¹ [The reference is to the description of the picture in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (first edition, 1846); in the second edition (1848), Ruskin noted that further examination had “made him doubt his interpretation of some portions of it.” See on this subject the editors’ note at Vol. IV. p. 268.]

² [A coinage of Ruskin’s, italicised by him; no other use of the word is recorded in Dr. Murray’s New English Dictionary.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]